I'll use the air-car. It's ready?"

"Yes." Leithgow answered. "But, Carse--one question I must ask--"

The Hawk, already halfway to the door in the opposite wall of the
laboratory, paused and looked back inquiringly.

"What bodies are to be used?"

"The only ones available, Eliot," the adventurer replied, "since Ku
Sui, in his attempt to destroy the brains, left us only two hours--now
one hour--to complete the first steps of the transfer. They'll be
those four white assistants of his--those men, you remember, whose
intellects he's dehumanized--"

"Yes, yes?" Leithgow pressed him eagerly. "And the fifth?"

"A robot coolie."

"Good God!"

"I know, Eliot! It won't be pleasant for one of those brains to find
itself in a yellow body. But it's that or nothing."

The scientist nodded slowly, his first expression of shock leaving his
old face to sadness: "But, a coolie. A coolie...."

"Come, Eliot, we need speed! Speed! We've but an hour, remember, to
complete the first steps! I'll have Ku Sui and the five men down
immediately."

The Hawk opened the door and strode down the long corridor beyond. His
footsteps were swiftly gone: and then the sound of another door
opening and closing. In the laboratory there was a murmur from the old
man.

"A coolie! A scientist's brain in that ugly yellow head! When
consciousness returns, what a cruel shock!"

CHAPTER IX

_Four Bodies_

Hawk Carse had gone into Leithgow's ship hangar.

It was a vast place, occupying most of the hollowed-out space of the
hill. Seventy feet high and more than two hundred feet long, it was,
and, like the rest of the rooms, metal-walled and sound-proofed. Eliot
Leithgow's own personal space-ship, the _Sandra_, rested there on its
mooring cradle, and by its side was the laboratory's air-car, an
identical shape in miniature, designed for atmospheric transit.

The adventurer, a silent, swift figure, went straight to the air-car
and climbed into its control seat. He tested the controls, found them
responsive, then pressed a button set apart from the others: and the
huge port-lock door set in the farther wall of the hangar slid
smoothly open, revealing a metal chamber similar to that of the ship
port-lock on Ku Sui's asteroid. But whereas the chamber of the
asteroid's port-lock was for vacuum-atmosphere, this was for
water-atmosphere.

The clamps of the mooring cradle were released, and the air-car moved
gently into the lock chamber. The